Top 3 Bass DJs: Skrillex Leads as Two Votes Split Fatboy Slim and Sub Focus

Bass music has never been one sound, and DJ Radar's top 3 bass DJs, ranked by credit score, show that on their own. Dubstep, breakbeat and drum & bass each take a place on the podium: three tempos, three toolkits, one shared obsession with the low end.

First place is clearly decided. Second and third are not.

Skrillex leads with a credit score of 953, 38 points ahead of second place. It is the one gap in this ranking that nobody needs a calculator to read. His vote count of 14,949 is the largest in the group by a distance. The next-highest is 8,004.

The platform numbers point the same way. Skrillex draws 20,503,207 Spotify monthly listeners and holds 7,765,966 Spotify followers. His SoundCloud following of 6,675,563 is the biggest of the three by a wide margin, and his 12,088,192 Instagram followers are also the highest in the group.

For a DJ ranking, the Resident Advisor figure is worth singling out. Skrillex leads there too, with 89,527 followers, so his lead comes from more than streaming.

Fatboy Slim, the list's breakbeat entry from the United Kingdom, holds second with 915. On Spotify, the distance to first looks enormous: 6,987,511 monthly listeners, roughly a third of the leader's figure, and 1,570,604 followers.

Last.fm tells a different story. Fatboy Slim counts 2,619,287 listeners there against Skrillex's 2,957,022. On that measure the gap between first and second narrows sharply, which is a good reason not to treat any single platform as the whole picture.

The rest of his profile holds up across the board: 735,000 YouTube subscribers, 1,016,591 Instagram followers and 66,463 Resident Advisor followers, second only to Skrillex in this group.

Sub Focus, also representing the United Kingdom, completes the podium for drum & bass with 898, 17 points behind Fatboy Slim.

Two votes. That is the whole difference between second and third on ballot count: Fatboy Slim has 8,004, Sub Focus has 8,002. With the voting this close, the 17-point credit gap is the only real space between them in this ranking.

Sub Focus does win one head-to-head outright. His SoundCloud following of 894,566 is more than double Fatboy Slim's 336,862. Elsewhere, Sub Focus has 3,919,303 Spotify monthly listeners, 644,821 Spotify followers, 290,000 YouTube subscribers, 359,578 Instagram followers, 162,900 TikTok followers and 41,172 Resident Advisor followers.

Taken together, the three suggest the bass family is a meeting point rather than a single lane. The United States holds first, and the United Kingdom holds second and third. From 953 at the top to 898 in third, 55 points separate the whole podium.

The headline belongs to Skrillex, whose lead shows up in votes, streams and club-platform following alike. The more interesting contest is underneath. With second and third separated by two votes, that is the race to keep an eye on.

Right now the bass ranking looks like this: dubstep out in front, with breakbeat and drum & bass almost level on votes behind it.